Let’s see, what has AMD been doing lately?
First, they announced a price cut, allegedly to clear out inventory for Phenoms.
At first glance, that sounds fine, except that AMD announced a new round of old models just a couple days later.
We’ll see a couple of low-speed items and a 65nm 2.9GHz chip shortly, then something a little bit faster in Q1 2008.
Why would AMD do that, especially the 2008 product, if they have faster and better Phenoms coming?
The answer is they’re not going to have faster Phenoms coming anytime soon. If you thought a 3GHz Phenom was going to show up with Santa, surprise!
No, the most you’re going to see from Phenom by Ho Ho Ho time is what looks to be maybe a bit overvolted 2.6GHz, if the power requirements are any indicator.
Will there be a 3GHz Phenom X4 in Q1? No. Will there be one in Q2? No. If you want a 3GHz K10, you’re going to have to buy an FX in Q2, probably in June.
I don’t doubt you’ll be able to overclock a December or later X4 to around 3GHz (and maybe those reports we got about 3GHz processors were reports of overclocked processors), but by the time you can do that, you’ll be able to overclock a Penryn to around 4GHz.
Any speedy cripplecores coming soon? Uhhh, no. They show up in March, at a whopping 2.3 and 2.5GHz speeds.
Some may ask, “Surely the duallies will do better?” No, they’re going to do a bit worse; they aren’t showing up at all until Q2, again, read that as meaning June.
The sad, sad truth is for about the next six months on the desktop, the fastest AMD CPU for just about anything that doesn’t take serious advantage of multithreading (i.e. most apps) is going to remain an X2. A 90nm X2.
What can I say? This isn’t competitive against Penryns. This isn’t even competitive against C2Ds. I don’t see how this lineup is going to turn things around financially for AMD the next two quarters.
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